I'd like the LCD-4 myself if they didn't replace the upper mids with the Grand Canyon. The newest version has almost zero ear gain and they sound muffled by neutral standards. That's not acceptable for $4K even if the rest of the response is decent.
Sean Olive measured them recently:
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I'm all for measurement Dealux, but I'm always at gigs and in the end music is an emotional experience to me. How close does my equipment bring me to the emotional experience of a live performance?
The problem here is while the LCD4s are VERY expensive and have measured flaws, with the right front end they bring me emotionally closer than anything else out there I've tried. I don't feel the upper mids are "muffled", or if they are, well the trade offs are worth it. I've never heard the LCD2s but I also have the LCD3s (practically mint and going on sale) and the LCDxc (essential for many situations where I have sound leakage problems both in and out)
I'm not in the golden ear brigade, far from it, I'm an audiofool sceptic and don't trust their fairy dust.
But the measurement fanatics I don't agree with either, even though I think measurements are really interesting and really important. I'm a double blind randomised trial kind of guy, from my science background. After all, this is about auditory perception and emotional response.
You know what i'd really like to see, and it might be out there already, but
i'd like to see trials that determine which measurements are the most important for delivering emotional satisfaction. Please point me to a thread on that if there is one here.
Worshipping measurements without context is a fools game. The context is what do the measurements deliver in a correlation with emotional satisfaction. Please anyone don't take that personally, that's not my intent at all. I really like and value this site and what I learn from it, and I respect the measurement exponents.
It's not an easy question to answer and different measurements will equate to different people's emotional satifaction. Beats by Dre and Bose are two products I avoid like the plague. But when I sold hifi 30 years ago I sold so much Bose and it made so many people so happy. That says a lot. I trained a lot of ears too, it was a journey for many people.